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Edmund Russell
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Evolutionary History
Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth
We tend to see history and evolution springing from separate roots,
one grounded in the human world and the other in the natural world.
Human beings have become, however, probably the most powerful
species shaping evolution today, and human-caused evolution in populations of other species has probably been the most important force
shaping human history. This book introduces readers to evolutionary
history, a new field that unites history and biology to create a fuller
understanding of the past than either field of study can produce on
its own. Evolutionary history can stimulate surprising new hypotheses for any field of history and evolutionary biology. How many art
historians would have guessed that sculpture encouraged the evolution
of tuskless elephants? How many biologists would have predicted that
human poverty would accelerate animal evolution? How many military
historians would have suspected that plant evolution would convert a
counterinsurgency strategy into a rebel subsidy? How many historians
of technology would have credited evolution in the New World with
sparking the Industrial Revolution? With examples from around the
globe, this book will help readers see the broadest patterns of history
and the details of their own lives in a new light.
Edmund Russell is Associate Professor in the Department of Science,
Technology, and Society and the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He has won several awards for his work, including
the Leopold-Hidy Prize for the best article published in Environmental
History in 2003; the Edelstein Prize in 2003 for an outstanding book in
the history of technology published in the preceding three years; and the
Forum for the History of Science in America Prize in 2001 for the best
article on the history of science in America published in the previous
three years by a scholar within ten years of his or her PhD. His previous
books include Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (coedited with Richard P. Tucker, 2004) and War
and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World
War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge University Press, 2001). He has
published articles in the Journal of American History, Environmental
History, Technology and Culture, and the Washington Post.
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Studies in Environment and History
Editors
Donald Worster, University of Kansas
J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University
Other Books in the Series
Donald Worster Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, second
edition
Kenneth F. Kiple The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History
Alfred W. Crosby Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900–1900, second edition
Arthur F. McEvoy The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California
Fisheries, 1850–1980
Robert Harms Games against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu
of Equatorial Africa
Warren Dean Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History
Samuel P. Hays Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the
United States, 1955–1985
Donald Worster The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental
History
Michael Williams Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography
Timothy Silver A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in
the South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800
Theodore Steinberg Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of
New England
J. R. McNeill The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History
Elinor G. K. Melville A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the
Conquest of Mexico
Richard H. Grove Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens,
and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860
Mark Elvin and Tsui’jung Liu Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in
Chinese History
Robert B. Marks Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late
Imperial South China
Thomas Dunlap Nature and the English Diaspora
Andrew C. Isenberg The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History
Edmund Russell War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals
from World War I to Silent Spring
Judith Shapiro Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in
Revolutionary China
Adam Rome The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of
American Environmentalism
Nancy J. Jacobs Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History
Matthew D. Evenden Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River
Myrna I. Santiago The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican
Revolution, 1900–1938
Frank Uekoetter The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi
Germany
James L. A. Webb Jr. Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria
Richard W. Judd The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of
Conservation in America, 1740–1840
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Evolutionary History
Uniting History and Biology
to Understand Life on Earth
EDMUND RUSSELL
University of Virginia
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Edmund Russell
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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York ny 10013-2473, usa
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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
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© Edmund Russell 2011
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2011
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Russell, Edmund, 1957–
Evolutionary history : uniting history and biology to understand
life on Earth / Edmund Russell.
p. cm. – (Studies in environment and history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-76211-3 (hardback)
1. Evolution (Biology) 2. Evolution – History. I. Title.
qh366.2.r88 2011
576.8–dc22
2010037126
isbn 978-0-521-76211-3 Hardback
isbn 978-0-521-74509-3 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate
or appropriate.
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Edmund Russell
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This book is about continuity and change over generations,
so it is for the generation before me,
Anne Caldwell Russell (1934–1992) and Edmund Paul Russell Jr.,
and the generation after,
Anna Sankey Russell and Margaret Sankey Russell
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Edmund Russell
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Contents
Figures
page xi
Tables
Preface
xiii
xv
Acknowledgments
xix
1. Matters of Life and Death
1
2. Evolution’s Visible Hands
3. Hunting and Fishing
6
17
4. Eradication
5. Altering Environments
6. Evolution Revolution
31
42
54
7. Intentional Evolution
8. Coevolution
71
85
9. Evolution of the Industrial Revolution
10. History of Technology
103
132
11. Environmental History
12. Conclusion
145
151
Note on Sources
Glossary
167
171
Notes
Index
177
211
ix
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Edmund Russell
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Figures
2.1.
3.1.
6.1.
8.1.
9.1.
9.2.
9.3.
9.4.
9.5.
9.6.
9.7.
Darwin’s branching bush of evolution.
Hunting was an evolutionary force for elephants.
Domestication in action.
Rickets may be the reason for light skin.
Products of different evolutionary histories.
New cottons, then new machines.
Inventors capitalized on New World cotton.
Industry relied on New World fiber.
Paying a premium for New World traits.
Different genomes, different odds.
Old World cottons were superior in India.
page 7
18
62
88
112
115
116
117
118
123
126
xi
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Tables
2.1.
9.1.
12.1.
12.2.
Understanding of Evolution
Alternative Explanations for Industrialization of Cotton
Social Forces Have Shaped Evolution
Evolution Has Shaped Human History
page 9
130
154
162
xiii
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Preface
Beverly Rathcke planted the seed of this book in a lecture she gave in
an ecology class during my first semester in graduate school. She told
us about cotton farmers who tried to control an insect pest by spraying
an insecticide. This strategy worked for a while, but then a couple of
puzzling things happened. The first was that farmers found themselves
battling more and more species1 of insect pests as the years went by.
The second was that their insecticide lost its ability to kill insect species
that it once had clobbered. Farmers substituted a new type of insecticide,
which worked for a while, and then it, too, failed. They kept replacing
insecticides, and increasing the frequency of spraying, until they had no
poisons left. With no way of halting crop destruction by insects, farmers
had no choice but to abandon growing cotton on thousands of acres.
To understand why farmers battled ever more species of pests over
time, Beverly explained, one had to bring ecology to bear. One of the
central concerns of this discipline is explaining the abundance of organisms. In farm fields, one finds many species of insects. Some species live
in such large populations, and eat so much of a farmer’s crops, that we
call them pests. Populations of dozens of other insect species also live
in farm fields, but most pass without notice because they cause no measurable damage to crops. In some cases, they are not pests because they
eat something other than the crop. In other cases, they do feast on the
crop, but their populations are too small to cause measurable losses. Several factors keep populations of insect species small, including predation
by other species of insects. (Picture ladybugs preying on aphids.) This
means that from the farmer’s point of view, some insect species in fields
xv
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Preface
are harmful (because they gobble up crops), but other insect species are
beneficial (because they kill the insects that eat the crops).
A children’s rhyme supplies an analogy. In the house that Jack built,
Jack was like a farmer. The malt in the house that Jack built was like a
crop. The rats that ate the malt in the house that Jack built resembled
crop-eating insects. (Because we are talking about populations of animals
rather than single individuals, we will make some species in the story
plural.) The cats that ate the rats that ate the malt in the house that Jack
built were predators akin to insects that prey on other insects. Now let us
modify the story and add another species: the mouse. Mice lived in the
house and ate the malt, but the cats killed them so efficiently that losses
to mice were trivial. Mice resembled insect species living in farm fields in
very small populations.
Now we have three species of mammals in Jack’s house (not counting
Jack) and a pair of predator-prey relations. One species, the rat, was
numerous enough, and fond enough of malt, to qualify as a pest. A
second malt-eating species, the mouse, inhabited the house in such low
numbers one rarely noticed it and so it did not rise to pest status. A third
species, the cat, benefited Jack by killing rats and mice. A similar cast of
insect characters inhabited cotton fields – a large population of a cropeating species (a pest), small populations of other crop-eating species, and
populations of varying sizes of insect-eating (predatory) species.
Next imagine that Jack decided his losses to rats were unacceptably
high. How might he respond? One way would be to import more cats.
Another would be to poison the rats. Let us say Jack chose the latter route
and scattered poison about the house. And let us say he chose a poison
lethal to many mammalian species, including cats and mice, and these
two species succumbed along with the rats. Furthermore, let us say other
rats and mice lived in surrounding fields and migrated quickly into the
house once the poison decayed. Cats, on the other hand, migrated in more
slowly because they lived in the barns of distant neighbors. It would not
be hard for populations of rats and mice to explode and for the mice to
cause enough damage to join the rats as full-fledged pests. Now Jack lived
in the house with lots of rats and mice but no cats. Ironically, in trying to
kill one species, Jack accidentally helped a second species become a pest.
Insecticides had similar effects on insects in cotton fields. Many insecticides kill a wide range of insect species, beneficial as well as harmful. When spraying for one species of insect pest, farmers accidentally
killed off populations of beneficial species of predatory insects, too. Freed
from predation, populations of formerly rare plant-eating insect species
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blossomed into full-blown pests. Spraying thus had the ironic effect of
increasing rather than decreasing the number of pest species. (Enough
insect species have become pests as a by-product of spraying that entomologists have a term for them: secondary pests.) Spraying did not create
new species, but it helped populations of several species become plentiful
enough to cause economic problems. This explained why the number of
pest species attacking cotton fields increased over time despite regular
doses of insecticides.
To solve the second puzzle – the failure of insecticides to kill species
they formerly controlled – Beverly turned to evolutionary theory. Unwittingly, cotton farmers had been carrying out experiments in Darwinian
evolution by natural selection. In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin summed up his theory this way: if “variations useful to any organic
being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have
the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the
strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the
fittest, I have called Natural Selection.”2
Darwin would have little trouble applying his theory to insects in cotton fields. First, he would note that “variations useful” to individuals did
occur. When spraying began, most individual insects of a given species
in a given field (that is, a population) were susceptible to a given insecticide. A few individuals, however, were resistant to the insecticide because
they happened to possess some biochemical machinery that detoxified
the poison. So individuals varied in a “useful” trait. Second, Darwin
would observe that this difference in traits influenced the “chance of
being preserved in the struggle for life.” Resistant individuals survived
spraying more often than susceptible individuals. In Darwinian terms,
spraying selected for one trait (resistance) and against another (susceptibility). Third, because of “the strong principle of inheritance,” individual
insects “produced offspring similarly characterized.” Susceptible parents
produced susceptible offspring, and resistant parents produced resistant
offspring. Today we attribute “the strong principle of inheritance” to the
passing of genes (strings of DNA with instructions for how cells should
operate) for traits from parents to offspring.
Puzzle solved. Insecticides did not lose their ability to kill insects
because the poisons changed; they lost their ability because the target
insect populations changed. When spraying began, susceptible individuals outnumbered resistant individuals in a cotton field by far, which made
the insecticide effective. But each round of spraying acted as a selective
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Preface
force, favoring the survival and reproduction of the resistant over the susceptible. Repeating this process over many insect generations increased
the proportion of resistant individuals in the population until the insecticides failed to kill enough pests in the population to make it worth
spraying. The insect population had evolved.
The encouragement of secondary pests and the evolution of resistance
launched farmers onto something called the pesticide treadmill. In the
short run, a pesticide worked, but in the long run, it failed. Farmers
substituted a new insecticide, and the process repeated itself, ad infinitum. Beverly described this process as a coevolutionary arms race: insects
evolved resistance, which led to a technological change by people, which
led to more evolution for resistance, which led to more technological
change, and so on. Farmers mimicked the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, running ever faster on the treadmill just to stay where they were.3
That evening, I gushed about Beverly’s lecture to my wife as she was
preparing dinner. (I think we were having burritos, but it could have been
spaghetti. On our budget, we had one or the other most nights.) I have a
feeling that even now, I have not identified all the reasons the story seemed
so compelling, but I can point to some. It occupied the middle ground
between the human and the natural. It showed reciprocal effects over
time. It required the linking of tools from science (evolutionary ecology)
and humanities (history) to understand events. You will see those same
ideas in this book.
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Acknowledgments
I owe many people debts for making this book possible. Beverly Rathcke
and John Vandermeer, cochairs of my PhD committee at the University of Michigan, taught me about the role of human beings in ecology
and evolution. I will always be grateful to them and to Earl Werner
for encouraging me to write a history-oriented dissertation in a biology
department as well as to three historians at Michigan (Richard Tucker,
Gerald Linderman, and Susan Wright) for their support and advice as
committee members. I wrote my dissertation while a predoctoral Fellow
at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History,
where curators and Fellows created a community that functioned much
like a graduate program in history. Pete Daniel and Jeffrey Stine played
especially important roles in helping a biologist become a historian. All
these people helped me write my PhD dissertation, which used the history of chemical weapons and insecticides to examine the relationship
between war and environmental change. The dissertation discussed the
coevolution of insects and insecticides (among other things), and this
book generalizes on that theme.
I was fortunate to publish my revised dissertation with Cambridge
University Press (War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with
Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, 2001), which enabled
me to work with Frank Smith and Donald Worster. They were model
editors, patient and insightful in their advice. That experience led me
to return to Cambridge with a proposal for a book on evolutionary
history (defined in Chapter 1) using dogs as a case study. Frank advised
splitting the book in two, with one book making a big argument about
evolutionary history and the other focusing on the canine case study.
xix
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Acknowledgments
It was excellent advice and made me grateful, once again, to be working
with such an astute and helpful editor. You have the first of those books
in your hands, and I hope you will look for the dog book when it appears
(also from Cambridge).
Frank Smith, Donald Worster, John McNeill (who now coedits the
Cambridge series), Michael Grant, Brian Balogh, and Lucy Russell commented helpfully on the entire manuscript. Jonathan Wendel and Guy
Ortolano offered excellent advice on Chapter 9. Brian Balogh also served
as an important sounding board on our weekly walks. The book incorporates these people’s suggestions about matters large and small. Tom Finger
and Jennifer Kane have been model research assistants. Heather Norton
and Jonathan Wendel responded with extraordinary care to queries about
their work. Thank you all so much.
As editor of the journal Environmental History, Adam Rome played
a key role in advancing the ideas in this book. I presented a conference
paper with some rudimentary notions about evolution and history, and
Adam suggested I turn the paper into an article. He did me a big favor
by sending back the first two versions of the manuscript. The third, and
much improved, version appeared as “Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field,” Environmental History 8 (April 2003): 204–228.
Environmental History is a publication of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society, and I thank them for
permission to reprint material from that essay in the chapter on environmental history (Chapter 11) and elsewhere in this book.
I owe a similar debt to the organizers of the 2002 Industrializing Organisms conference at Rutgers University: Philip Scranton, Susan
Schrepfer, and Paul Israel. Philip and Susan edited a collection of essays
growing out of the conference, which they subtitled “Introducing Evolutionary History.” Introductory comments I made at the conference
became a chapter in that volume (Edmund Russell, “Introduction: The
Garden in the Machine: Toward an Evolutionary History of Technology,” in Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History,
ed. Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton [New York: Routledge,
2004], 1–16). I thank Taylor and Francis Group LLC for permission to
reprint material from that essay in the chapter on history of technology
(Chapter 10).
Figure 9.1, a photo of cotton bolls, appears here after a good-faith
effort to find the rights holder. The photo appears without attribution
in Arthur W. Silver, Manchester Men and Indian Cotton 1847–1872
(Manchester University Press, 1966), 293. Manchester University Press
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xxi
has no record of the photo’s source and claims no rights. The press and
the history department at Temple University (the affiliation listed in the
book for Mr. Silver) have no contact information. I was unable to find
him in a Google search.
I have appreciated the support and advice of colleagues in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society and the Department of History
at the University of Virginia. A sabbatical leave from the University of
Virginia and a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES0220764) supported research for this book. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation. I thank those institutions and individuals for their support.
Audiences at Cambridge University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of British Columbia, Juniata College, Virginia Tech,
University of Kansas, University of Oklahoma, University of Virginia, the
American Society for Environmental History annual meeting, the Society
for the History of Technology annual meeting, and the Rutgers University
conference on Industrializing Organisms commented helpfully on ideas.
Thanks go to my wife, Lucy, and our daughters Anna and Margaret
for tolerating this project with good cheer. I could not live without you.
Charlottesville, Virginia
April 14, 2010
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